R.E.M.

"In the past 10 years, we had figured out how to completely lose focus in the studio-- with no one to blame but ourselves."

R.E.M. have become so embedded in our popular culture that it's easy to forget that those three letters once referred to something other than the quartet from Athens, Georgia. As alt-rock nerds and sleep therapists know, the acronym derives from the term rapid eye movement, the period of sleep during which dreams occur. This is, it turns out, pretty crucial to Michael Stipe's songwriting. Speaking by phone from Austin, where the band later would play a late-night set at South by Southwest and tape an episode of "Austin City Limits", Stipe explained the significance of dreams on R.E.M.'s new album. Emphasizing short, sharp songs, Accelerate updates the band's old sounds-- Peter Buck's Byrds riffs, Michael Stipe's speaking voice, Mike Mills' high-flying harmonies, and drums that mimic Bill Berry's punchy rhythms-- from the 1980s and 90s to the late 00s, from Reagan and Bush I to Bush II, from dreams to the real world.

Pitchfork: What made you go with Irish producer Jacknife Lee for this album?

MS: It was Edge actually who kind of pushed us toward Jacknife. He had worked with U2 and Edge thought it would be a great marriage of minds for us and Jacknife to go into the studio together. I was really thrilled with the work he had done on Snow Patrol and Bloc Party. When we met him, he was really good and straight talking, so we were excited. Smart guy. It seemed like it would be a good mix.

Pitchfork: What exactly did he bring to the studio?

MS: I think he's got his own style, but more than anything it's probably just a directness, a straightforward way of communicating, which is something that the band we were looking for in ourselves on this record [needed]. And he definitely has his own sound. I think he does, anyway. It's a little different. He doesn't necessarily come from rock music and so the universe that he collides with our universe is interesting. I like the sounds he brought and I like the enthusiasm he had for the material and for helping us to make what he wanted to be a great R.E.M. record. I think we came pretty close, you know?

Pitchfork: It definitely sounds like he took some of these older sounds that maybe we haven't heard in a while and found some new context for them.

MS: I think that's something... Hold on a minute.

[long pause]

I just had a stitch come out. I had a wisdom tooth taken out last week.

Pitchfork: Really?

MS: I've been waiting for that to happen. That's really exciting.

Pitchfork: Good. I thought that long pause would be a bad thing.

MS: No, it's a good thing. It's supposed to, what is it called? It's dissolvable. I don't know if it was your comment or my tongue that made it happen, but there it is.

Pitchfork: I think it must have been my comment.

MS: [laughs] The material was basically when we brought Jacknife into the equation. What it was, really, was the band realizing that somewhere in the past couple of records, in the past 10 years, we had figured out how to completely lose focus in the studio-- with no one to blame but ourselves. We were working with an excellent producer named Pat McCarthy, someone who did not have an enviable job of trying to get the three of us to agree on anything or even sit down at table and talk about it.

He had a really tough job-- particularly on the last record [2004's Around the Sun], because we released a best-of right in the middle of it and went out and toured that. We came back and tried to pick up where we had left [off]. We had just completely lost focus on it. So when we went to write this material and start working on it-- and again this is before Jacknife came in-- we wanted something that was super-immediate and we wanted something that felt kind of raw. We went to the most obvious place, which was to do really fast songs that were really short. Peter did what he does, I did what I do, and Mike did what he does, so we kind of trimmed the fat, if you will, and got down to the very basics that make each of us musicians. And so what you're left with is this type of material performed with Peter doing... a couple of times in the past ten years, I've said to him, I want that thing again. Just for the longest time I said, Stop doing that, to Peter. Or, Mike would be like, The vocal is really great as it is, and it's coming from an articulated place conceptually, so I don't think it really needs background vocals. So he wouldn't do background vocals. Or, I would say, Yeah, I think it stands alone. Or whatever. So anyway, we threw our cards on the table and did what comes naturally when we've got a more broken-down palette of colors to work with. And that's what you wind up with. I'm really happy with it.

Pitchfork: A lot of people have remarked on the punchiness and conciseness of the album. Is that a reaction to Around the Sun?

MS: You're going to read that over and over again, and we freely admit that we lost focus on the last record. But we also say, and people tend to downplay this part, I really like the material on that record. I think the songs are great. It's just the way we approached them in the studio that really I don't think made them shine as much as they might have. And whatever steps we've taken, I'm not going to badmouth any of the work that we've done, but I'm also not deluded about it. It's not as much of a reaction as reporters who we've sat at a table face to face with... Everyone comes into an interview situation with their own story and their own idea and then they cherrypick the comments that help create their argument. And so I think for the band members it's not as much a reaction to the last record as you might read. It's simply that we all realize that we had lost focus, and we did the most obvious thing, which is to write really fast songs that are really in your face and kind of raw.

Pitchfork: That whole "reaction" line seems to be an easy story to sell.

Pitchfork: Let me ask about this upcoming tour. Can you give me a sense of how these songs translate live and what sort of older stuff you'll be fitting into the set?

MS: We haven't had that conversation yet, so I don't really know. Again people are overstating or overplaying the older songs that we played in Dublin. I admit that I was talking about the [older] songs and learning from them as we were playing them, but a lot of people took that story and ran with it or took some aspect of that and created their own narrative. So I don't really know. We did a handful of songs the other night at a show in Florida called Langerado [Music Festival], and that turned out a pretty good set. But we have a fucking huge catalog to choose from, so we can do whatever we want, I guess. People want to hear and we want to play "Man on the Moon", "Losing My Religion", and whatever, but we can pull from wherever we want. We're a little limited in that we have limited keyboards on this tour. There are some songs that we might have to change the way we play them. But that's their concern and not mine.

Pitchfork: These new songs sound like they should play well live.

MS: Outside of our rehearsal space, we've only played it one time in front of an audience, which was night before last. And it felt really good. It felt great, in fact.

Pitchfork: You're having Modest Mouse, the National, and the Foals open for you. What drew you to them?

MS: I like all three of those bands. The National's the only band that I've actually seen perform, so I'm excited to see Modest Mouse and the Foals. Here in Texas, for instance, one of the bands that's playing the same bill as us at this barbecue joint called Stubb's is Paper Cranes out of Gainesville, Florida-- that's Rain Phoenix's band. She's written a bunch of new songs since I last saw the band and I'm really excited to see them. It just speaks to the position that we wound up putting ourselves as a band into that we're able to pick and choose the bands that play on the same bill with us. That's totally fortunate because you wind up with a Foals or a Modest Mouse or a Joseph Arthur or a Paper Cranes instead of same hack band that you don't like that much. So that's really cool.

Pitchfork: R.E.M. has a history about that. I know you took the Minutemen, Indigo Girls, Grant Lee Buffalo, even Radiohead on tour with you.

MS: We've got a pretty good track record. We can pick ‘em.

Pitchfork: Are you going to see anybody while you're at South by Southwest?

MS: I don't know that I'm going to have time, to tell you the truth. I'm doing a lot of this kind of thing while I'm here. We're playing a show at Stubb's, and there's a bunch of other bands on the bill. So I'm hoping to get to see them.

Pitchfork: I hate to ask about a specific song...

MS: Go ahead.

Pitchfork: I wanted to ask about "Sing for the Submarine", especially what sound like some references to some older songs. It sounds almost like you're addressing a past self, or trying to explain yourself.

MS: I can tell you. It's really simple. That song presents my dream world, which is way different from my waking world. It's set in the future and it's post-apocalyptic. Everything is falling apart and it's all put together again, propped up with 2x4s and held together with Scotch tape and superglue. The artwork for the record is kind of an homage to that. It's a collage, which rhymes with homage, I just realized. It's an homage to this kind of almost like a teenager's idea of what the future might look like, if he were using a Xerox machine and cut-and-pasting it together. Which is exactly what we did to come up with the artwork.

So the song "Sing for the Submarine" is just taken from... I actually made it up. It's not from my dreams, but it's placed in that dream world. The older R.E.M. songs in there-- it's like a legend on a map to all the other songs in our catalog or some of the other songs in our catalog that also come from my dream world. And although they're not autobiographical-- because I don't write like that-- for me it's a pretty familiar place. By writing a song and referencing these other, older songs I'm creating for anyone who cares a legend to where the inspiration for these lyrics and these ideas came from, and also admitting, or kind of outing myself, in terms of that part of my consciousness that comes from my dreams, which is set in the future. It's a post-apocalyptic future, but it's not frightening. It's not scary. I think a lot of people probably inhabit that same universe. I look at other writers or filmmakers particularly-- a handful of photographers, but a lot of filmmakers who do science fiction work or what have you-- seem to inhabit that same dream world, so I don't feel that alone. I've talked to a few people in my life who've said they've had similar experiences. It's going back to when I was a child that all my dreams are set in this destroyed future, but I'm fortunate that it's not a frightening place or a scary place. It just is what it is. Does that make sense?

Pitchfork: Perfect.

MS: That's where "Feeling Gravity's Pull" came from. That's where "Electron Blue" came from-- electron blue being a drug that's made out of light. "Sing for the Submarine" is about a guy who in fact has gone so deep into this almost neurotic state that he's imagined a way to escape from the city with his loved one in the event of some cataclysmic...event. And that escape route is by way of a submarine that is fueled by melody. And that creates the template for the song.

I'm really thrilled about my stitch coming out. That's just fantastic. It's like if you ate a giant piece of celery and it was hanging in your tooth for a week. So I'm really thrilled that it's gone.